Lions of King’s Landing: Tyrion Lannister, Cersei Lannister, the Hand of the King Tywin Lannister

Lions of Harrenhal: Jaime Lannister

Direwolves of the Wall: Jon Snow

Direwolves of Riverrun: Robb Stark, Catelyn Stark

Mockingbirds of King’s Landing: Petyr Baelish

The Burning Heart, Melisandre

The Kraken, Theon Greyjoy

The Direwolf, Bran Stark

Direwolves of King’s Landing: Sansa Stark

The Direwolf, Arya Stark

Archers of the Wall: Samwell Tarly

The Stag, Gendry

Stags of King’s Landing: King Joffrey Baratheon

Bows of the Wall: Ygritte

Spiders of King’s Landing: Varys

Flowers of King’s Landing: Shae

Winterfell is abandoned and in ruins, Yunkai is empty.

The episode is divided into parts. The first runs three minutes and is set north of the Wall. The opening image is of the fire Sam is ineptly building.

The second runs three minutes and is set in the North. The transition is by hard cut, from a zoomed out shot of Sam and Gilly around their fire to Meera skinning a rabbit.

The third runs four minutes and is set north of the Wall. The transition is by dialogue, from Joren talking about his vision of Jon Snow to Jon.

The fourth runs eight minutes and is set in the Riverlands. The transition is by family, from Jon Snow to Arya Stark.

The fifth runs two minutes and is set at the Wall. The transition is by family, from Arya Stark to Jon Snow.

The sixth runs six minutes and is set at the Dreadfort, though this is not disclosed. The transition is by hard cut, from the climbing party to Ramsey blowing a horn.

The seventh runs four minutes and is set in Riverrun. The transition is by dialogue, from Theon trying to guess which of Robb’s bannermen Ramsey is to Robb.

The eighth runs two minutes and is set in Harrenhal. The transition is by dialogue, from Catelyn to Brienne talking about her.

The ninth runs four minutes and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by family, from Jaime to Tywin Lannister.

The tenth runs three minutes and is set at the Wall. The transition is by hard cut, from a broken pen to climbing.

The eleventh runs nine minutes and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by family, from Jon Snow to Sansa Stark. The second section is four minutes long; the transition is by dialogue, from Sansa to Littlefinger and Varys talking about her fate.

The twelfth part runs three minutes and is set on the Wall. The transition is by dialogue, from Littlefinger talking about chaos as a ladder one climbs to Jon reaching the top of the Wall. The final image is of Ygritte completing a Full Web with Jon Snow after seeing the Seven Kingdoms for the first time in her life.

Analysis

Let’s start with the official short description of the episode, if only because we’ve never done that. Plus it lies. I mean, the official descriptions always mislead (“Second Sons” full description has the series’ greatest to date in “Sam and Gilly meet an older gentleman”), but “Four Houses consider make-or-break alliances” is a flat-out miscount. It clearly refers to what, in the longer description, is “Tywin plans strategic unions for the Lannisters” (a brilliant scene between Charles Dance and Diana Rigg) and “Robb weighs a compromise to repair his alliance with House Frey,” (a scene with Richard Madden) but the truth is that five Houses in this story actively consider make-or-break alliances over the course of the episode. It’s just that one of these is meant to be obscured, namely the conversation between Jaime Lannister and Roose Bolton.

And obscured it is. Indeed, where this season is heading is basically not set up at all except in the most superficial sense of getting Robb to the Twins. This is of course a kind of setup, but it’s worth stressing what it isn’t, which is one based on any real sense of foreboding. Robb is being set up to fail, but as we’ve noted before, there’s not really any direction to it; just an unconnected sequence of errors to communicate the message “Robb is losing” (which he handily communicates in as many words this episode) without gesturing towards the actual nature of this failure.

This is in marked contrast to A Storm of Swords, in which Martin continually revels in the textual game of obscuring clues through the limitations of his viewpoint characters. Reading A Storm of Swords with knowledge of how it ends reveals a piece of genuinely elegant clockwork; hints begin to be laid as early as A Clash of Kings via Daenerys’s visions in the House of the Undying, and A Storm of Swords proceeds to set out an intricate conspiracy involving luring Robb to break his oath to Walder Frey via a love potion, with clear hints of what’s going on. For instance, during Tyrion’s first meeting with Tywin the book makes it clear that Tywin has intelligence regarding Robb’s troop movements that’s subsequently clearly implied to have come from Roose Bolton, who is also explicitly shown to be aware of what really happened at Winterfell. Here, however, even at the point of his meeting with Jaime he is plausibly simply quietly taking an insurance policy against a faltering King, as opposed to an active traitor.

A similar class of problem exists around Littlefinger’s actions. In reality he is currently engaged in an elaborate alliance with the Tyrells to murder Joffrey, with a sideline plot to kidnap Sansa in the process. This latter point is alluded to by dint of his intrigue-off with Varys over the last few episodes, but there’s not even a trace of the former here. (And, of course, this involves removing a larger structure of A Storm of Swords, namely the implication that Melisandre’s blood magic is responsible for clearing the field of other kings, and the consequential interconnectedness of the Red and Purple Weddings. More on this last point in Part Four of the treatise.)

In place of this sensible macro-plotting, however, we get the last Varys/Littlefinger face-off, a subgenre of scene entirely the invention of the show, and one of its strongest cases for being the better iteration of the game. Thus far they have mostly been pleasantly taunting sparring matches, generally won by Varys. Here, however, two things change. First, Littlefinger is brutally successful; Varys is absolutely routed here. Second, we see their opposition presented in starkly ideological terms. These are not new ideologies; Varys has always been the straightforward utilitarian, seeking the course of action that minimizes suffering (save for his delightfully shocking treatment of the man who cut him), Littlefinger always the ruthless Objectivist. But the decision to position them as dualism, along a classical high fantasy order/chaos distinction, is new.

On one level it is simply a depressing confirmation of the show’s bland authoritarian-liberal values and sexual sadism. And yet the “chaos is a ladder” speech - which, it should be noted, makes barely a lick of sense - remains a genuine stunner. Part of it is its sheer ostentatiousness - Aiden Gillen’s gloriously camp reading over an uncharacteristic use of montage containing what may be the single most viscerally horrifying image in Game of Thrones in the form of Ros’s obviously tortured essentially naked corpse still hanging from her wrists on Joffrey’s bed. It would be difficult for this not to stand out, even without the smash-cut to Jon and Ygritte that constitutes what may be the single loudest title drop in the entire history of play. Indeed, in many ways no scene exemplifies the current state of the game; a tawdry spectacle built out of phenomenal acting, defining and anchoring an episode that is otherwise chasing its own tail.

Aylwin
2 years, 2 months ago

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Dadalama
2 years, 2 months ago

chaos as "the bad thing" has always bothered me. All chaos is is unpredictability. I don't know what in the hell Littlefinger was talking about, but Varys sounds like he was talking about unrest. Or a riot.

In the midst of unpredictability, there are opportunities for advancement in the game that are not available when all the possible moves are otherwise known.

What I really love about the end, though, is how Jon and Ygritte's ascension is played as a counterpoint to Littlefinger's aspirations. There are far better ladders to climb than those of politics. (It's an especially interesting implication for those of us following the Chair Agenda.)

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Aylwin
2 years, 2 months ago

For the people actually living where one is going on, rather than commenting on them as abstract social phenomena happening somewhere else, riots make life a good deal less predictable. Fairly major things that most people can reasonably count on most of the time, like "my home is not going to get torched tonight" become more of an open proposition.

And Varys isn't talking about a riot, which is a momentary spasm of disorder in a generally orderly society, but about enduring chaos. Warlordism. Early Anglo-Saxon England, early Capetian France, pre-modern Ireland, Libya 2016, that sort of thing.

When people who have lived through both tyranny and sustained anarchy express a preference for the former (as they tend to), it's precisely on the grounds of predictability. All right, so and so was a rapacious brute, but you knew where you were with him. If you paid up, did what you were told, kept your eyes down and your mouth shut, him and his thugs would probably leave you alone, and they could ensure that no other bunch of thugs troubled you. Whereas when there's a dozen petty bands of thugs roving around the place fighting each other, any one of them could decide to do you at any time, and there's not much you can do to alter the likelihood of it.

I mean, it's that logic of predictability that basic consent to be governed is in large part built on - that even if the taxes are high, it's better to pay them regularly with the assurance that that'll be the lot, than to live with the constant prospect that someone may take everything from you tomorrow, and likely beat/rape/kill you in the process.

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David Faggiani
2 years, 2 months ago

Varys and Littlefinger remind me a bit of the two 'outside the narrative', Angel/Demon characters in "The Hudsucker Proxy" - I believe they were called Moses and Aloysius in that. They confront each other directly during the end of the narrative, which I hope Littlefinger and Varys will too.

Although that would probably be too obvious. I can't even imagine what fate is going to befall either of them in the books. I personally hope Littlefinger gets eaten by an ice spider.

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Comment deleted
2 years, 2 months ago

Daru
2 years, 2 months ago

"Aiden Gillen’s gloriously camp reading over an uncharacteristic use of montage containing what may be the single most viscerally horrifying image in Game of Thrones in the form of Ros’s obviously tortured essentially naked corpse still hanging from her wrists on Joffrey’s bed."

I'll be honest and say that this scene where Ros is tortured and her body displayed I found very hard to watch, and I still haven't seen that section of this episode. Probably I will always skip that part.

Really with you jane on the beauty of the ascension imagery as John and Ygritte ascend the wall and how this links to Littlefinger's speech. Lovely stuff.